the.com/airspeed
how fast you move through the air, which the ground may rudely disagree with
means The speed of an aircraft relative to the air it's flying through, as opposed to its speed over the ground.
from A straightforward compound of "air" and "speed," both ancient Germanic words — "air" arriving in English via Old French and Latin from Greek "aēr," and "speed" from Old English "spēd," which once meant success or prosperity (to do something "with good speed" was to do it well). The pairing is a child of aviation, coined alongside the flying machine in the early 20th century, when pilots needed to distinguish how fast they cut through the air from how fast the world slid by beneath them.
- ground vs air
- A jet can fly backward over ground in fierce headwinds
- swallow query
- Monty Python's joke birthed a real unladen-swallow estimate: 11 m/s
- thin air lies
- Instruments read low at altitude; true speed is much higher
- stall point
- Too slow and wings simply quit lifting
- never exceed
- Pilots track a red-lined speed where planes break apart
concorde — supersonic passenger aircraft reaching mach 2.04 (1,354 mph) in service 1969-2003
bell x-1 — first aircraft to break sound barrier at mach 1.07, piloted by chuck yeager on october 14, 1947
sr-71 blackbird — reconnaissance jet reaching sustained mach 3.3 (2,193 mph) during cold war missions 1964-1998